How Do You Equip Gear in Caretakers?

Equipping gear in Caretakers happens in the Loadout menu — the same screen that holds your emotes. Open it in the lobby, put an item you already own into a gear slot, and that item then waits on a numbered key during the round until you press it. Owning a piece of gear and having it ready are not the same thing: the player in the gameplay footage this guide is based on went down in his first match because the mask was in his loadout, but "I DIDN'T KNOW I had to put it actually on."

Both equip changes captured in that footage were lobby changes — one just before entering the bunker map, one between rounds.

What you need before you start

Gear has to be owned first. Equipment is sold in the shop, where gear bundles sit next to an "Extra gear slot" purchase, and the Supporter bundle also granted usable items in the recorded session. If you don't own anything yet, the guide to unlocking gear covers acquisition — this page starts at the moment the item is yours.

Where the equip action lives

The menu is called Loadout, and it doubles as the emote screen. The recorded player actually found his gear slot while hunting for emote options — "How do I equip emotes? Oh, load out emotes." — and the gear slots sit in that same menu. So if you know where your emotes are, you know where gear equipping happens.

How to equip or switch an owned item

1. Open Loadout while you're in the lobby — before the round starts or between rounds.
2. Find a gear slot. A new player starts with a single one ("I've got like a gear slot").
3. Place an owned item into the slot. The recorded player put the entity mask into his, expecting to use it against entities: "we'll just put the entity mask on, I guess, and we can use that. It banishes them."
4. Fill any extra slots the same way. After buying an "Extra gear slot" from the shop, he reopened Loadout and assigned the Taser to the new one — "Right. Load out. Boom. Second slot. Taser." — whose description says firing it at an entity will stun them.

The footage shows items ending up in slots, but it never narrates the exact assign interaction, so let the menu's own on-screen prompts settle the final click or drag.

How to confirm the gear is actually active

Run this three-part check in your next round:

1. Find the item on its numbered key. Equipped gear shows up in-round on a numbered key — his mask was "my thing is on number one."
2. Press it once. Pressing the key triggers the item: "If this thing comes near me, we boom. We put the mask on. Mask on. Mask on."
3. Watch the effect apply. He wore the mask mid-chase to get away ("I put the mask on and run"), and the scanner gear — described as "Scans all objects on the map and highlights them all" — instantly revealed the task location he'd been hunting when he activated it ("I want to try this scanner. Boom. Oh, it was right here.").

That middle step is the one players skip. A slot assignment is passive; the item only does anything when you press its key. Trigger each newly equipped item once while you're safe, so you know what it feels like before an entity is on you.

Restrictions on changing equipped gear

• Gear slots are the limit. You start with one slot and can buy an "Extra gear slot" in the shop; one purchase took the recorded player from one slot to two ("Boom. Two gear slots."). You can keep only as many items equipped as you have slots. A single extra purchase is all the footage shows, so two is what's demonstrated, not a confirmed maximum.
• The documented workflow is lobby-based. Both observed equip changes happened in the lobby — before a map and between rounds. Whether Loadout can be opened mid-round is never shown or stated, so build your loadout before you drop in.
• The game was new when this was recorded. The player notes it had "literally just released," so menu labels and shop items may have shifted since — the steps above describe the interface as it appeared then.

For what each item does once it's equipped — the entity mask, the Taser, the scanner and the rest — see the Caretakers gear list.